A group of Scandinavian researchers recently did an experiment trying to tease that out. Their goal: to find out how social attitudes towards inequality in the U.S. and Norway differ, in an effort to explain why the two countries have such different redistribution policies. The difference, they discovered, hinges on how people think about luck and fairness.
“In Norway, people very much disapprove of inequalities that are due to bad luck,” Bertil Tungodden, a professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, and one of the paper’s authors, told me. “People in the U.S. are more willing to accept inequality, even if it reflects pure good luck for some and pure bad luck for others.” [...]
There were some differences in which demographics in each country were willing to redistribute the bonuses. Conservatives in both countries accepted inequality (resulting from either chance or effort) and did not redistribute. Higher-education Americans were more meritocratic than lower-education Americans, though in Norway, educational background did not make a difference in someone’s willingness to redistribute. Women in the United States were less likely to accept inequality resulting from either source, according to the experiment.
The experiment did not look at questions of race, which may be one reason the countries have differing views on welfare. As I’ve written before, white Americans tend to be more withholding when it comes to welfare if they believe the money is going to black Americans. It would be illuminating for another, similar study to be performed that looks at whether white people perceive luck as more or less fair if the beneficiary (or loser, as the case may be) is black.
No comments:
Post a Comment